On Wednesday, the night before the special election for Montana’s House seat singular, which, fun fact, used to belong to Pat Williams, Knievel’s less action-packed Democrat cousin, the Republican candidate Greg Gianforte allegedly (on tape) clobbered a four-eyed journalist who was trying to ask a pretty good question about whether or not 23 million Americans’ losing their health insurance might be, like, bad. That didn’t stop him from being announced the winner Thursday night. And if that embarrassing incident didn’t whip up enough hubbub on cable TV, on Sunday, Missoula-born David Lynch rebooted his beloved head-scratcher series of yore, “Twin Peaks,” on Showtime.

For the record, as a Montanan who attended sixth grade in the same brick building where Gary Cooper went to high school, I prefer violence of the fictional, cinematic variety, especially when the age-old conflict of man versus man is reimagined as short-haired Kyle MacLachlan versus longhaired Kyle MacLachlan. I heartily disapprove of real-life violence. That includes assault perpetrated on a member of the press by a candidate whose TV ads were all about how bully he is for the Second Amendment because apparently he’s never heard of the First.

If there are two Americas — or three, depending on how we’re all feeling about Florida — there are at least that many versions of Montana. Off the top of my head I can count the following constituencies: farmers; ranchers; miners; artists, including folk singers, though let’s not underestimate our potters; the inhabitants of two lefty college towns, Missoula and Bozeman, where I grew up; and the coastal refugees such as Mr. Gianforte, who was denigrated in attack ads as a “New Jersey millionaire,” which seems unfair to New Jersey, considering he was born in California and grew up in Pennsylvania before attending school in Hoboken, so maybe some sort of interstate blame-sharing accord can be negotiated.

If we count the seven sovereign tribal nations such as the Blackfeet and the Crow, our list more than doubles. Then again the “miners” include those coal miners our new president has such a crush on, but also the former copper miners and their descendants in the union-made socialist bulwark of Butte, a town so hard-boiled Dashiell Hammett once set a novel there.

So what’s the tally — at least 14 varieties of Montanan? Fifteen if we include the summer roofers-winter ski bums affectionately known in my home valley as “dirt bags.” The dirt bags might look like a bunch of Hillary-voting hippies, but based on my five winters during the Reagan-Bush era tending bar at the local ski area, Bridger Bowl, they’re stingy tippers and therefore, I suspect, secret Republicans.

All of which to say, even though Montana is the fourth largest state and therefore one of the biggest red blotches on the Electoral College map, Montanans are not unlike the founders who came up with the Electoral College in the first place. If we have learned anything from the First United States Congress, it’s that a bunch of mostly middle-class white Protestants all wearing the same powdered wigs (or down jackets) can be nevertheless too diverse and too geographically spread out to ever cohere.

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Greg Gianforte, the Republican candidate in a special House election, with supporters at a campaign event in Billings, Mont., last month.CreditJenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times

On Wednesday evening, after my sister sent me a message alerting me that Mr. Gianforte was being accused of shoving a reporter and breaking his glasses, I turned on the television and texted her back that it was all over cable news. “They should call Jeff Bridges!” she replied, referring to the movie star who lives part time in neighboring Paradise Valley. Citing Mr. Bridges’s protagonist from “The Big Lebowski,” she added, “This aggression will not stand, man!”

I cringed listening to the Gianforte tape for all the normal human and patriotic reasons. But also because it conforms to the Trumpian flyover rube stereotype that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the bookish, movie-mad, bleeding-heart tenor of my Montana college town years participating in what used to be called the “peace movement.” Which sounds so quaint and old-fashioned now that this country is so militaristic we will name a Navy ship after the former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

But back in my youth protesting the Iran-contra deal at the Federal Building, riding my bike 13 miles to hear Jesse Jackson speak during the ’88 primary, or handing out mimeographs denouncing the Reagan administration’s military spending in grocery store parking lots, my fellow ineffective progressives and I did not see ourselves as a bunch of beatnik outliers. We saw ourselves as carrying on the longstanding nonviolent tradition of Montana’s Jeannette Rankin, the only member of the United States House of Representatives who voted against entering both World War I and World War II and lived long enough to demonstrate against the conflict in Vietnam.

The polls were still open Thursday night when I went to Willson Auditorium to Bozeman High School’s choir concert to see my nephew perform. I came up in the same excellent public school music program, playing in the very same hall. All my discipline, my work ethic, much of what I know about perseverance, teamwork, camaraderie, world history and the G-sharp minor scale I learned playing in this district’s bands and orchestras. Everything I heard about Russians in my Cold War childhood was shaded with hatred and fear and yet playing Tchaikovsky was never not a joy. Every time I come across one of these white supremacists that seem to be coming out of the woodwork I think, here’s a person who never had to improvise a trumpet solo on a melody by Duke Ellington.

And, right around the time the special election polls were closing, the tenors’ choir hammed it up on a happy-go-lucky version of “Louie Louie” and I was pretty sure the Republic would endure.

Mr. Gianforte, by the way, lives in Bozeman, but chose to send his children to a Christian private school, which strikes me as criminal when the public schools are pretty good but, unlike the thing with the reporter, not technically illegal. I’m guessing he wanted his children to be taught according to his beliefs — apparently that evolution is a myth and humans coexisted with dinosaurs. Which means that a state that has been at the forefront of paleontology for decades thanks to the local hero Jack Horner, the first person to discover dinosaur eggs in the Western Hemisphere, will be represented in Congress by the guy who donated the T-Rex on display at a cheesy creationist museum in Glendive.

Still, I have questions. Would the early voters who cast absentee ballots for Gianforte well before his hissy fit have changed their minds? Will the readers of this East Coast newspaper ever stop picturing Montanans as unhinged, authoritarian hotheads and remember that some of us are Lynch-loving, Lebowski-quoting, lily-livered lefties who have a postelection tradition of walking over to the Jeannette Rankin statue in front of the post office and putting our “I Voted” stickers on the heel of her boot even though we can see how that could technically be construed as littering?

And finally, will Laura Palmer’s cousin Maddy from Missoula pop up somewhere on the space-time continuum of the new “Twin Peaks”? Because, like the vast majority of Montanans, she was nice.